About ivan Scheduling Software

ivan is a project scheduling package developed by McLachlan Software Pty Ltd in Australia.

Because McLachlan Software's parent company was directly involved in project management themselves they had a ready testing ground for the ivan software.

The essential feature of ivan is that it is entirely graphical. If you imagine that to produce a programme manually you would sit down and draw a number of bars representing activities and then draw the dependencies that form your network logic, then this is exactly how ivan works. In Addition ivan has features such as CPM calculation to adjust your schedule according to the logic you have entered.

In ivan, schedules are drawn onto the screen. If you have drawn project schedules before then you will be on familiar ground when using ivan.

ivan is designed to model the way a project manager constructs a project schedule. As a result, the process of constructing a schedule consists of the following steps:

  1. Construct a time grid
  2. Determine the events that must occur for successful completion of the project
  3. Draw bars to represent the events that are being scheduled (These may be lines with arrows and circles at each end or solid bars)
  4. Determine the relationships between activities and their nature (programme logic)
  5. Draw dependency lines between the activities to represent the programme logic
  6. Determine what calendar should be applied to the project
  7. Determine what resources are required for the project
  8. Determine resource availability and modify allocations accordingly
  9. Run critical path method (CPM) on the program to determine accurate completion dates
  10. Monitor the progress of the job modifying the schedule as required

In ivan the above tasks are completed by "drawing" onto the schedule with a "pen" using a mouse. Other tools are available in ivan for manipulating the objects (activities, dependencies, resource profiles, text, lines, bitmaps). These tools allow the programmer to move, stretch, copy, magnify and erase various objects.

We welcome your enquiry regarding any of your software or network management needs.